‘I don’t understand,’ he says.
‘We need to thieve unbranded LipService. Not just enough for us. A whole consignment.’
‘We can’t just get that from Wordini… we’d have to…’
‘I know – breach production.’
The idea worms a trail through the fruit of his brain. ‘What do you want with so many patches?’
‘Programme them.’
‘With what?’
‘Literat… urge…’ There’s a latch in my throat and it’s closing. The patch is drained.
Compared to the grand kleptocrazy planned, a bit of LipService fraud is a pilfering affair, reasons Stillwell. He’s suggested I patch into EmPath. Then at least it won’t be so obvious if we run into anyone that I’m from ‘the other side of the bed curtain’. Luckily, Bromide has recently issued a limited number of tweaked patches for peer review before the reformulation’s submission for beta testing on the brand market. The test transdermal would still be programmed for EmPath, and Stillwell said he doubted the latest quip van wrinkle was much more than a ‘triggered stimulant release’ Bromide had been working on. That was until the doctor personally expressed his professional delight at the lab tech’s participation in the testing. Now Stillwell isn’t so sure about the tweak. But since he has to write the report on it, it’s probably still best if he uses the trial and terror transdermal and I take the conventional one from his allocated supply.
I’ve locked myself in the bathroom because I don’t want him to see how his transdermal gives me anxieties. ‘Physician reveal thyself. Physician reveal thyself,’ runs like a chant daring the bogeyman to appear in the mirror instead of my own face. Will You rise from the bled anew, transformed into a blood-letter? If I think about it any more I’ll lose my vagus nerve. There is no other way; I must go undercover of the patch.
I lose my gravitational moorings in the vomit comet of disorientation but that passes faster than usual. Already, this patch feels different to the consumer brands. There’s a cloy-alloy to its oily tasture that moves down my neck like a multiplying series of brass collars, telescoping my head away from my shoulders. The plinth of metal chokers my chin rests on disconnects me from the soft organic squelchings of my body. I am aware of my cross-modal interactions and gustatory hallucination but am detached from such things. From up here, I coolly survey the bathroom. I observe its intubated systems, their metabolic mechanics and borborygmi. So vice-like is their hold on my attention that I don’t even notice You at my shoulder until You say, ‘Now you see with a clinician’s hyperopia.’
Outside the bathroom, I see Stillwell, or at least the interacting biochemical stewings that go by that name. I note an increased respiratory rate and pupil dilation. This unexpected metabolic shift doesn’t escape my surgical scrutiny. ‘Adverse effects?’ I ask.
‘With prosthetic languages, the leaking of silicone contents into the tissues is as common as with mammoplasty augmentation,’ says the imbalanced organism, which then appears to suffer retroperistalsis. It recovers, thrusts something at me and says, ‘Remember the aims of this operation?’
Eda-Lyn’s black-ink tentacles slide over my skin and draw me down from my abstracted anatomical attitude. During the bus ride to the hospital manufactory, I keep my hand inside my canvas bag, resting on the damp squid of her hide to remind me how medicine’s nitrous-oxide highs are my downfall. It’s harder than I thought to resist that cerebral serene – even You are content to be drawn into its perfect analytical composure. How does Stillwell manage? I reach to taste the warm milk of human kindness in his hand.
17
We walk across the hospital manufactory grounds. Because Stillwell might be recognised, I’ll have to discourse as the senior clinician. He’ll be the faceless flunky with his head hidden behind a load of boxes he’s carrying that are labelled as Bromide’s reformulated transdermal. I don’t know how he arranged for those to be ready for him at the manufactory depot or how he got my fake identity card. I had no way to ask before patching into EmPath, and now he’s instructed me to ‘Engage in echolalia as it’ll assist in overlearning’. So I repeat my doctor’s script after him, memorise his apparatchat. He’s afraid that, despite being conversant in health care, I might not use the right tourniquet of phrase at the right moment.
I pall into silence as we approach the entrance to the dubway – the underground railway that transports unbranded patches from the hospital manufactory to programming sites. I’ve tried so many patch brands but I never really managed to stay in character. I doubt I can doctor my persona now.
Stillwell peeps around his tower of boxes. ‘It’s not acculturation, Frith. Just role play.’ There’s that bilious bobbing in his throat again as he says it. I want to ask him about his presenting problem but we’re already at the transdermal scanners.
They’re much the same as the one at Wordini’s office for detecting patch signatures. Stillwell promised that, with our EmPath patches, getting through them would be as easy as freezing a verruca. And it is. After I’ve passed through, I watch him come through behind his box camoufaçade. It occurs to me for the first time that the containers will register as empty, as he’s told me they are. But they don’t. The guard waves him through without looking at him, and I see the computer terminal register the contents as ‘EmPath/experimental’. I can’t begin to understand how he did it. I had never before really grasped the power Stillwell has to talk to and command machines.
The registration counter is ahead. This causes extreme vasoconstriction of my peripheral vessels, and tachycardia. The fear makes me slip into counting beats per minute. I resist but then let the pulses of the sinoatrial node thump everything into affectlessness. It’s a step forward to the counter but back from myself.
I announce myself: ‘Dr Limsey. These experimental transdermals and I require neurotransmission across the synaptic gap to communicate with programming staff.’
‘Research project code?’ asks the foreign culture from inside the Petri dish cubicle.
Stillwell drilled me on this even while I was disenlangauged, making me repeat the eleven-digit code silently in my mind so that my head was as full of meaningless noise as my useless voice.
‘No booking has been recorded for that code.’
I lean into the window and I’m surprised at my own – our own – authoritarian menace. ‘You’re not going to impede scientific progress with a case of hysterical paralysis caused by psychogenic conflict with your hypochondriacial protocols, are you?’ The guard sits transfixed by your and my double glare. We are the twin serpents of the caduceus, entwined around the medic’s staff. He still appears utterly immobile but there is a click as the electric doors down to the platform slide open. I stride through without a backward glance at Stillwell. But I hear his soft voice.
‘Just as Dr Bromide would’ve done it.’
The train is already at the station being loaded by workmen. One or two move a muffling hand to mouth, making the mute sign in deference to a doctor. It kindles the remember-ember of Poppy at Lost Property and I snap out of your pathological tunnel vision.
‘Stop the visual fixation,’ hisses Stillwell as I continue to stare at the tongue-denied workers. ‘It’s a contractual requirement. If they’re not refractory aphasics, they receive intravenous language blockers – as a security measure. A doctor would know that.’
We board the carriage directly behind the driver’s cab, where only a small space isn’t loaded with unbranded LipService and we can sit on fold-down seats. Neither of us says anything. I look out the open door at the track on the other side of the platform and notice scrawlings on the walclass="underline" ‘Fuck politics’, ‘Wait here for further instructions’ and ‘Your mum smell’. Stillwell follows my glaze and says, ‘Pre Lingua Quietus.’ It can’t be. No one who had never come of haemorrh-age would write such spitty speech gobs. Why would they? They could write anything. Besides, these were the people who wrote books.